Tuesday, December 03, 2013

eggs in winter

my egg lady's hens do not lay in winter. she does not light them artificially. seems to me that a chicken might appreciate some additional light during the dark parts of the year, but maybe not.

anyway, i winter i have to get my eggs somewhere else.

saturday morning i was out to play with a friend and we came across a house where they were selling eggs for $3/dozen, which is a good price for pastured chickens, especially if you consider that if you can GET pasture raised chicken eggs at the store, they go for six dollars a dozen.

it's a lot of money for eggs, but i like eggs and things i make with eggs and i cannot bear to buy eggs from battery farms knowing how those animals live.

and then there's world health, because agribusiness doesn't want to stop feeding antibiotics to the herds and flocks because regular feeding of antibiotics increases profits, but we don't have very many years left before we (the people of the world) have no antibiotics we can use anymore.

there already exist bacteria that are resistant to every antibiotic we have, and forty percent of people who get that bug die. that bug is so deadly that if you get it, your best bet is for the part of your body that gets it TO BE CUT OFF.

and the really cute thing about this bug? it is able to pass its antibiotic resistance to OTHER bacteria.

that's right, kids. they teach each other how to beat our antibiotics.

now, this arms race between us and the bacteria has been going on as long as we have existed as organisms, but our own agribusinesses are hastening our demise, and our pharmaceutical companies are not developing new antibiotics because there's not enough money in that.

there's little profit in developing drugs that people with firm diagnoses will take for ten days and then be done with it. drug companies want to make drugs people will take for the rest of their lives, drugs that can be widely prescribed for conditions that are more nebulous, and drugs for erectile dysfunction.

because there's a TON of money to be made of of old rich guys' penises. and the medicalization of aging. the natural decrease of testosterone is now a medical condition that needs to be treated.

"it's not you," the ads say. "you're still young and virile. you just have low T".

i'm calling bullshit.

you're getting older, just like the rest of us. you do not need to have a woody like you did when you were sixteen.

so yeah, i'd like to see drug companies working on the problem of antibiotic resistance. i'd like to see agribusiness quit feeding the remains of our antibiotic resistance to the inhumanely treated animal living in filth.

and i'd like to see more people not buying the products of these bad practices.

Whoot! I stopped dairy many months ago and switched over to eggs only from a local farm where the chickens are pastured, eat bugs and regular chicken stuff, and anyone is allowed to drop in without notice just about any time to check the place out. If I can't get them from her, I can go without. For the same reasons you stated and discussed.